Do not buy EMPREX flash drives (pos unlike any other drive)

[JazzJackRabbit]

Man, I just bought one and what a POS it is. My old USB 1.1 128MB lexar was getting far too small (only 5MB left currently) and far too slow for my everyday needs. So I waited till 4th of july to see if there are any drives available on sale and Fry's had EMPREX 2GB USB2.0 drive for $40 w/o any rebate. So I bit and bought it. The package looked a little cheap, but the drive itself was smaller than most of the other drives and had sturdy aluminum housing.

When I got home I promtly reformatted the drive under NTFS and tried copying some files over to it. Imagine my surprise when the drive was slower than 70 year old grandma in a 20 mile speed zone. It took about a minute to copy just 5Mb of data. I timed it on a smaller chunk of data, about 1MB and it took it 10 seconds to trasnfer it. WTF is that? That comes out as 100Kb/s... That's about 10 times slower than my 3 year old lexar that's not even USB2.0. I tried copying a single file instead of a bunch of smaller ones, and it performed a little better, transferring 30MB single file in about 20 seconds. Still it's far too slow. When the drive is first inserted, it takes windows 10 seconds to recognize it and it takes the same amount of time to safely unplug it. I'm not patient enough to deal with this kind of crap waiting 10 seconds for every sneeze. I'm really disappointed, I'm taking the drive back tomorrow.


Here's the little sucker (apologies for not linking, for some reason forum cannot parse the link)
http://shop4.outpost.com/%7BLqtWqzKGOq4 ... IN_RSLT_PG

EDIT:
These top 6 drives from newegg look very much like the emprex drive I have bought (except for the keystring clip). I suppose they share the same manufacturer, so DON'T buy those.